Crypto

President Donald Trump has granted a pardon to Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the founder of Binance, after months of behind-the-scenes efforts by Zhao and his allies to secure clemency.

A new legal filing alleges that a cryptocurrency promoted in January by U.S. First Lady Melania Trump was part of a sophisticated scheme that used celebrity association to lend legitimacy to token launches, according to Wired. 

Canada’s financial intelligence agency has fined Vancouver-based cryptocurrency exchange Cryptomus nearly C$177 million, saying the firm failed to report thousands of transactions that may have involved sanctions evasion and money laundering tied to fraud, ransomware and child sexual abuse material.

The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has filed a High Court lawsuit against crypto exchange HTX, alleging the platform unlawfully promoted cryptoasset services to consumers in breach of the country’s financial promotions regime, the Financial Times reported. 

France’s banking supervisor is intensifying on-site anti–money laundering (AML) checks at cryptocurrency firms as it decides which of the country’s more than 100 registered platforms will qualify for EU–wide authorization in the coming months, Bloomberg reported.

U.S. regulators have granted preliminary and conditional approval for Erebor, a new national bank founded this year by technologists Palmer Luckey and Joe Lonsdale in a move pitched as filling the void left by Silicon Valley Bank’s 2023 collapse, the Financial Times reported. 

U.S. and UK authorities seized roughly $15 billion in Bitcoin and multiple London properties allegedly linked to a sprawling online fraud scheme based in Cambodia.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said new federal guidance on Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) is intended to ease banks’ “pain points” and shift U.S. anti-money laundering oversight toward measurable effectiveness.

Jeffrey Epstein remained embedded in Wall Street’s elite financial networks in the years before his 2019 death, maintaining accounts at more than 20 banks and executing large transactions with prominent investment firms, according to new reporting by The Wall Street Journal. 

A previously undisclosed report by the Inspector General for the U.S. State Department and officials interviewed by ProPublica allege that former Ambassador to El Salvador Ronald D. Johnson protected Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele from American and Salvadoran law enforcement efforts.